A day before becoming the 61st speaker of the House (and the 15th Republican to hold the gavel), John Boehner strode into the speaker's main conference room to convene the first formal House GOP leadership meeting of the 112th Congress.

Unlike his colleagues, Boehner entered without his suit jacket; his heavily starched white shirt shone crisp in the sunlight scattering the shadows in the room. As lawmakers huddled around the rectangular table, a swarm of aides shouldered for space on the crowded perimeter.

After the applause died down, Boehner told his leadership team to "be careful" and "pay attention" to the staff members stuffed into the room. With a hard glare, Boehner said that in the future he wanted to economize the staff presence. Before formally seeking a 5 percent reduction in all congressional staff budgets, he wanted a deeper cut among the hangers-on present when his team met to plot and execute its strategy.

If it sounds awfully fastidious and controlling from a man stuck in the opposition for the past four years--a man who might be expected to exult in his victory, throwing caution to the wind--it should. Boehner has planned this moment for years, and he is not going to blow his speakership on cathartic but pointless expressions of ideology (even if that is what some of the bomb-throwing freshmen have in mind).

He wants to get laws passed, and he knows that doing so is a precarious business. If they will jeopardize his chance at repealing health care or cutting taxes, he won't tolerate frivolous investigations that alienate voters just for the sake of humiliating Democrats. And he won't overstate his case.

Boehner is a politician's politician. He is constantly taking the temperature of his members, balancing their interests against each other, checking the polls, and coordinating a unified message. He is already having to make adjustments--to find ways to balance expectations and performance, promises and deliveries. It is a glimpse of the leadership to come.

For Capitol archaeologists, Boehner convened his lieutenants in the room where former Speaker Newt Gingrich kept a bust of a Tyrannosaurus rex under glass--a toothy testament to his love of paleontology that he got on loan from the Smithsonian. As one top Boehner hand noted dryly, the new speaker is "not known as a fossil collector."

More to the point, Boehner doesn't want to become a fossil--not again. He was once a relic of the Gingrich revolution, a banished 1997 coup plotter against the speaker (it failed) who licked his wounds and steadily, quietly set his sights and ample strategic energy on one overarching goal--becoming speaker himself.

Jack Howard, a GOP lobbyist who worked as a counselor to Gingrich when he fended off the coup, holds no grudge against Boehner. In fact, he marvels at the newly minted speaker's ascent to power, fueled by his ability to move legislation (No Child Left Behind, pension reform, Glass-Steagall repeal, among other examples), and a knack for understanding how to maneuver around virtually any political obstacle.

"Boehner's like a guy who enters a revolving door behind you and comes out ahead," Howard said.

Boehner is now ahead as never before, and he has already imposed a level of discipline on himself and his leadership team that contrasts starkly with Gingrich's brash, bravado-driven approach to power. Gingrich guaranteed a revolution and even before becoming speaker found himself the subject of angry criticism for a $4 million two-book contract (was he trading on a constitutional office just won?) and for saying that poor, teenage mothers might lose their children to orphanages (prompting an "Uncle Scrooge" Time magazine cover).

Nobody wants Boehner to write a book; and welfare reform--the proximate cause of Gingrich's musings about orphanages--is done. But in contrast to Gingrich's talkative approach, Boehner and his top deputy, Majority Leader Eric Cantor of Virginia, and top vote-counter, Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy of California, have been almost invisible and silent. As GOP Hill wags note, it's not the first time that Cantor and McCarthy have acted strategically: It's just the first time the strategy has included silence.

"That's the difference between having been out of power for 40 years and being out of power for four years," said Bob Walker, chairman of the lobbying firm Wexler & Walker, and Gingrich's best friend in the House. "There's a higher degree of caution now."

In significant ways, this approach reflects the rise of the managers. Boehner, Cantor, and McCarthy all served in state legislatures before they came to Congress. Gingrich and then-

Majority Leader Dick Armey were former college professors and conservative ideologues bent on tearing out the New Deal and the Great Society root and branch.

For Boehner, much came quickly. He was elected in 1990 and was part of Gingrich's inner circle by 1993. Cantor and McCarthy have also risen with amazing speed--Cantor was elected in 2000, McCarthy in 2006. The three share a corporate, management mind-set. (At the first leadership meeting, Boehner's staff prepared a line-by-line agenda that the speaker-to-be followed to the letter before dismissing the meeting at the appointed time--3:30 p.m.) They have tried to keep expectations modest, operating on the under-promise, over-deliver philosophy of the service industry (McCarthy once owned a deli-cum-batting cage). Holding control of only one chamber of Congress, they know that there are limits on what they can deliver and that too-empty boasts will incur voters' wrath.

"I look at the arrival of this new session with a great dose of seriousness," Cantor told National Journal in an exclusive interview moments before Boehner was sworn in. "We have significant problems. People are not feeling very secure about their future. The matters at hand really require some very hard work and attention. We are really focused on trying to lead, to deliver results. If there was any mandate from this election, it was that this agenda put in place the last two years has not been acceptable to the American people. It has not delivered the results, and we've got to make sure that business as usual in Washington stops."

But as careful as the House GOP leadership team has been, it has not succeeded in corralling its freshmen, or even some more-experienced lawmakers, on key issues such as oversight and the looming vote--sometime in March--to increase the nation's debt ceiling to prevent a government default. The chairman of the Government Reform and Oversight Committee, Rep. Darrell Issa of California, branded President Obama's administration one of the most "corrupt in modern times." Issa later explained he didn't mean to imply illegality, merely policy failures, overspending, and overregulation.

Still, Issa's performance carried a whiff of a ready-shoot-aim approach to oversight that Boehner desperately wants the new House majority to avoid. In fact, he is looking to create a position in the speaker's office for an oversight overseer, a majordomo to ride herd over numerous committees and keep lines of communication open with the executive branch. The central goal, sources say, is to make sure that hearings are conducted in an orderly and politically manageable way (meaning, no inflated allegations, no duplicative topics, no from-here-to-eternity subpoenas).

On the debt-limit vote, Boehner and his team watched with dismay as Reps. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota and Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania said they might not support raising the ceiling. Skepticism runs deep in the Republican Caucus about the economic imperative to raise the ceiling above its current $14.3 trillion limit, and Cantor said that the GOP leadership will use a series of votes, including the health care repeal maneuver next week, to build support for the debt vote. The theory is this: If freshman Republicans, full of the animal spirits of the midterm elections, can take a whack at health care and get several spending-cut votes under their belt by the time the debt vote rolls around, they might be in a more malleable mood.

"We are going to be about cutting spending, and we're going to have several months prior to any vote having to deal with the debt limit," Cantor said. "We've committed to bring a bill to the floor every week that cuts spending, and when we get to that debt-limit vote, we're going to see what kind of legislative options are available to us in order to deal with that."

Walker calls the debt vote a "major challenge" for Boehner's team, a moment of potential and peril.

"It will set up as a major place where Republicans can have a huge impact on the administration," Walker said. "This is a point where we can have a serious discussion about where we go on spending."

But only if Boehner and crew can persuade rank-and-file Republicans and the conservative activists in and around the tea party to trade the debt-limit vote for a unified position to cut spending and then leverage the White House to go along. That strategy remains, at best, a work in progress. And the fraying of a GOP pledge to cut $100 billion in nondefense discretionary spending has already muddied the waters.

Republicans now say they won't cut $100 billion--even though that's the promise enshrined in their "Pledge to America." Why? Because the $100 billion figure was the difference between President Obama's 2011 budget (which Democrats never passed) and the 2008 Bush budget, a target that Republicans say they no longer have to meet because spending is now governed by continuing resolution that locks in the 2010 spending levels.

Tim Phillips, president of Americans for Prosperity, a grassroots group closely aligned with the tea party that agitated for lower spending and an end to earmarks even before there was a tea party, called the new GOP standard "lawyerly and nitpicking."

If House Republicans begin to walk away from big spending cuts, dissension could brew immediately, weakening the GOP before the debt vote and diminishing its ability to extract, or even credibly negotiate, a meeting of the minds with the White House on structural budget reforms or agreed-upon spending cuts. A deal with Obama on cuts would give the GOP a real accomplishment, as opposed to ephemeral victories on the House floor that die in the Senate and never make it to the president's desk. But that appears unlikely if the GOP ranks split. There's no cleavage yet, but warning signs are more prevalent than many expected to see this early.

Cantor also wants to use next week's health care vote as a tool to divide House Democrats, who already revealed their dissatisfaction with Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi when 19 of their number voted against her sure-to-be-defeated bid for speaker. Cantor considers those Democratic votes potentially gettable on the health care repeal bill. He fully expects the 13 remaining Democrats who voted against the measure in the 111th Congress to side with the GOP in this Congress, giving the effort at least the patina of bipartisanship. When asked if GOP leaders moved so quickly on repealing the health care law to rattle Pelosi and prove that she could not keep her ranks together in their new minority status, Cantor said, "Absolutely."

"This is all that they were about in the last Congress, and she still to this day defends it," Cantor said. "You're going to see some bleeding on their side on this bill--because many of their members understand that this election was about rejecting their agenda, a large part of which was the health care bill. I'm hopeful that will translate into a much better environment for those in the Democratic Caucus to come our way and join us in cutting spending, in shrinking the government, and beginning to get this economy stabilized again."

But the House GOP will ram the bill through the chamber. It will be debated under a closed rule, denying Democrats any chance to offer amendments to preserve key provisions of the law. Republicans decried the use of closed rules during the Democrats' reign in the House but will push through their repeal measure with precisely the same no-holds-barred mechanism.

"We do not believe the straight up-or-down vote on the repeal of Obamacare requires further amendments," said John Murray, Cantor's deputy chief of staff. "The bill and its contents have already been debated and litigated."

Republicans say they will return to open rules and numerous floor amendments after the health care debate. They predict more open rules by the end of next week than in the entire 111th Congress (one would do it, actually).

On health care and spending cuts, the new majority is rapidly encountering open conflicts with its election-season rhetoric and legislative realities. This reality check has opened them up quickly to Democratic criticism and to minor fissures among their members and supporters. Boehner and his team approached their perch of power with little fanfare or chest-thumping certainty. Their caution was grounded in an innate sense of the difficulties ahead--obstacles that they have already had some difficulty navigating.

Tension is ever-present in politics. Leaders try to harness it, direct it, compress it, and release it to maximum advantage. The most skilled legislators do this with a sort of sixth sense. Boehner, many Republicans (and even Democrats who know him well) believe, possesses this skill in ways that Gingrich and his GOP successor Dennis Hastert never did.

Welcome to the majority.

This article appeared in the Saturday, January 8, 2011 edition of National Journal.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

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In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

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The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

“All the world has failed us,” a resident of the Syrian city of Aleppo told the BBC this week, via a WhatsApp audio message. “The city is dying. Rapidly by bombardment, and slowly by hunger and fear of the advance of the Assad regime.”

In recent weeks, the Syrian military, backed by Russian air power and Iran-affiliated militias, has swiftly retaken most of eastern Aleppo, the last major urban stronghold of rebel forces in Syria. Tens of thousands of besieged civilians are struggling to survive and escape the fighting, amid talk of a rebel retreat. One of the oldest continuously inhabited cities on earth, the city of the Silk Road and the Great Mosque, of muwashshah and kibbeh with quince, of the White Helmets and Omran Daqneesh, is poised to fall to Bashar al-Assad and his benefactors in Moscow and Tehran, after a savage four-year stalemate. Syria’s president, who has overseen a war that has left hundreds of thousands of his compatriots dead, will inherit a city robbed of its human potential and reduced to rubble.

Even in big cities like Tokyo, small children take the subway and run errands by themselves. The reason has a lot to do with group dynamics.

It’s a common sight on Japanese mass transit: Children troop through train cars, singly or in small groups, looking for seats.

They wear knee socks, polished patent-leather shoes, and plaid jumpers, with wide-brimmed hats fastened under the chin and train passes pinned to their backpacks. The kids are as young as 6 or 7, on their way to and from school, and there is nary a guardian in sight.

A popular television show called Hajimete no Otsukai, or My First Errand, features children as young as two or three being sent out to do a task for their family. As they tentatively make their way to the greengrocer or bakery, their progress is secretly filmed by a camera crew. The show has been running for more than 25 years.

A recent study shows that people who simply ate more fiber lost about as much weight as those who went on a complicated diet.

By this time of year, many peoples’ best-laid New Year’s Resolutions have died, just seven short weeks after they were born. One reason why it’s difficult to lose weight—the most common resolution—is that dieting is so confusing.

For instance, the American Heart Association's recommended diet is one of the most effective food plans out there. It’s also one of the most complicated. It requires, according to a recent study, “consuming vegetables and fruits; eating whole grains and high-fiber foods; eating fish twice weekly; consuming lean animal and vegetable proteins; reducing intake of sugary beverages; minimizing sugar and sodium intake; and maintaining moderate to no alcohol intake.” On top of that, adherents should derive half of their calories from carbs, a fifth from protein, and the rest from fat—except just 7 percent should be saturated fat. (Perhaps the goal is to keep people busy doing long division so they don't have time to eat food.)